Cycling UK Forum

PH wrote: ↑11 Aug 2023, 1:15pm

Jdsk wrote: ↑11 Aug 2023, 11:50am

PH wrote: ↑11 Aug 2023, 11:36am
What examples would you like?
...

On the "misleading", anything on:

We are being sold the idea that if we all drive EVs, we can carry on in our present transport habits with all of the current benefits and none of the problems.

On people actually having being misled: anything. Including asking lots of people what they think.

Jonathan

You can be misled by omission. Try Googling "Should I buy an electric car" and see how many results answer that you shouldn't be buying any car. Or you could look at sales figures and advertising, the big EV selling point is range, where's the discussion on the cost of that, both resources and weight? Or look at what people are buying rather than look for what they might be saying, there's a couple of cars on both the best seller and most efficient lists, but the Venn diagram is depressing. Even more so if you research what's possible, but people like the big luxury vehicles, sod the consequences. Or look at the debate around ULEZ, great for Londoner's air quality, where's the discussion on all the other harmful effects. We are encouraged to carry on as if the answer is a change in fuel type, any message that that isn't OK gets buried, no one wants to hear it.

^^ This. ‘On the money’, so to speak.

Maybe put the question the other way round: who, in the motor industry broadly – manufacturers, organisations like RAC, motoring press, etc – or relevant government departments, is giving us the message that "EVs are less damaging than previous vehicles but we still need to drive far, far less"?

So, in my reply generally not having worked my way through all the contris, is coming from someone who has/had extensive experience in the motortrade latterly in the trade association and looking at the market as a whole more especially in Ulster, where unlike many parts of the UK haven't the population or infrastructure to support any other form of transport than motor vehicles. no train no bus route etc etc and we're being shoved by civil servants and their masters the government who know as much about the whole business as a dog knows of his father..full E ,city stuff yes, distance no.. hybrids yes...
Prime example, everything we wear , eat, ride on, is transported, and powered by fossil fuels, either diesel, petrol ,black ship oil, or kero, and to the best of my knowledge no-one has yet come up with a E truck that can do a Northern Ireland to Dover trip carrying a normal 20ish tonne payload, without a stop , not tacometer regulation involved..a truck guy recently told me they are bothered to do a trip of 100 mile empty, so surely practicalities need observation before we listen to any more crap, yes, Nirvana is a goal, but its a bloody long way off when you see the likes of the major euro makers pulling back from E power a few weeks ago...
E isn't the answer, China has the worlds largest supply of one battery ingredient , really ...could you see the USA cowtowing to them for juice making stuff..Toyota and Mercedes are still working and have been for 40 years with Hydrogen, there are still massive costs involved in that route..we just cannot stop fossil fuel for many years without a miracle, and they are a long time happening...will

willcee wrote: ↑12 Aug 2023, 10:28am So, in my reply generally not having worked my way through all the contris, is coming from someone who has/had extensive experience in the motortrade latterly in the trade association and looking at the market as a whole more especially in Ulster, where unlike many parts of the UK haven't the population or infrastructure to support any other form of transport than motor vehicles. no train no bus route etc etc and we're being shoved by civil servants and their masters the government who know as much about the whole business as a dog knows of his father..full E ,city stuff yes, distance no.. hybrids yes...
Prime example, everything we wear , eat, ride on, is transported, and powered by fossil fuels, either diesel, petrol ,black ship oil, or kero, and to the best of my knowledge no-one has yet come up with a E truck that can do a Northern Ireland to Dover trip carrying a normal 20ish tonne payload, without a stop , not tacometer regulation involved..a truck guy recently told me they are bothered to do a trip of 100 mile empty, so surely practicalities need observation before we listen to any more crap, yes, Nirvana is a goal, but its a bloody long way off when you see the likes of the major euro makers pulling back from E power a few weeks ago...
E isn't the answer, China has the worlds largest supply of one battery ingredient , really ...could you see the USA cowtowing to them for juice making stuff..Toyota and Mercedes are still working and have been for 40 years with Hydrogen, there are still massive costs involved in that route..we just cannot stop fossil fuel for many years without a miracle, and they are a long time happening...will

PepsiCo is currently trialling electric trucks with Tesla.

willcee wrote: ↑12 Aug 2023, 10:28am So, in my reply generally not having worked my way through all the contris, is coming from someone who has/had extensive experience in the motortrade latterly in the trade association and looking at the market as a whole more especially in Ulster, where unlike many parts of the UK haven't the population or infrastructure to support any other form of transport than motor vehicles. no train no bus route etc etc and we're being shoved by civil servants and their masters the government who know as much about the whole business as a dog knows of his father..full E ,city stuff yes, distance no.. hybrids yes...
Prime example, everything we wear , eat, ride on, is transported, and powered by fossil fuels, either diesel, petrol ,black ship oil, or kero, and to the best of my knowledge no-one has yet come up with a E truck that can do a Northern Ireland to Dover trip carrying a normal 20ish tonne payload, without a stop , not tacometer regulation involved..a truck guy recently told me they are bothered to do a trip of 100 mile empty, so surely practicalities need observation before we listen to any more crap, yes, Nirvana is a goal, but its a bloody long way off when you see the likes of the major euro makers pulling back from E power a few weeks ago...
E isn't the answer, China has the worlds largest supply of one battery ingredient , really ...could you see the USA cowtowing to them for juice making stuff..Toyota and Mercedes are still working and have been for 40 years with Hydrogen, there are still massive costs involved in that route..we just cannot stop fossil fuel for many years without a miracle, and they are a long time happening...will

That’s an interesting reply and it comes from someone who (IIRC) has an electric car.

The trouble with politicians is that they pander to the swing voters who in an election will given them the extra votes needed to win an election. I hate to use the analogy of Brexit but it’s a valid one: offer people what enough of them have an appetite for and do so with little to no idea of how it will actually be delivered. Going carbon neutral is another such ‘big idea’ where politicians seem to believe that the details will sort themselves out; reckless incompetence IMHO. Is going carbon neutral a good idea? Well doing nothing isn’t wise so a transition is needed, transition only works when you move between stuff that works and transition shouldn’t upset the apple cart but rather be next to seamless.

Perhaps I’m wrong, I don’t see much thought or investment but rather aspersions and directives which lots of folk hove no idea how to meet and little to no practical help available to them too. When stuff does work out it’s more due to the efforts of the man in the street rather than politicians, well that’s certainly how it feels.

willcee wrote: ↑12 Aug 2023, 10:28am Prime example, everything we wear , eat, ride on, is transported, and powered by fossil fuels, either diesel, petrol ,black ship oil, or kero, and to the best of my knowledge no-one has yet come up with a E truck that can do a Northern Ireland to Dover trip carrying a normal 20ish tonne payload, without a stop

It's the wrong question. Here we are at Y needing to get to Z and you're not thinking further back than W.
We ought to be thinking A -F, what is this stuff, if we need it, are there alternatives, does it have to travel so far.... Even if you can't contemplate that far back, somewhere around the middle of the alphabet you could start asking why it needs transporting as such a small unit, why not shipping via a local port, or on rail for the bulk of the journey. Only looking a little way back, you could ask why this is a single leg of a journey, a lot of European trucking is already trunking. This is nothing new, swapping the truck or the battery isn't much different logistically to changing the horses at a coaching inn.
I don't hold out much hope, everyone supports the idea of saving the World, no one wants any inconvenience.

fishfright wrote: ↑12 Aug 2023, 11:11am PepsiCo is currently trialling electric trucks with Tesla.

Not a great example though and somewhat demonstrating the point above. Pepsi is mostly water and I'm sure we all know there's better ways to transport that. Even when it's bought from a fast food outlet, it's transported there in syrup form and the carbonated water added in-house.

PH wrote: ↑12 Aug 2023, 11:40am

fishfright wrote: ↑12 Aug 2023, 11:11am PepsiCo is currently trialling electric trucks with Tesla.

Not a great example though and somewhat demonstrating the point above. Pepsi is mostly water and I'm sure we all know there's better ways to transport that. Even when it's bought from a fast food outlet, it's transported there in syrup form and the carbonated water added in-house.

Pretty much all soft drinks are transported as syrups and water added closer to the market.

It is a good example of a new technology being applied in the real world, where Northern Ireland to Dover isn't seen as an insurmountable barrier to development .

What's lacking in this country is a forward looking attitude instead of pining for an made up past.

With forums nowadays mostly filled with older white men who have already wrecked the environment and who are unwilling or unable to change their precious lifestyles you get a very distorted view. . In places with a younger audience it's a different story with people willing adapt.to the challenges ahead and a growing hate of the damage done to the world by ICE's.

Jdsk wrote: ↑11 Aug 2023, 10:25am

Bmblbzzz wrote: ↑11 Aug 2023, 9:43am We are being sold the idea that if we all drive EVs, we can carry on in our present transport habits with all of the current benefits and none of the problems. This is false

Biospace wrote: ↑11 Aug 2023, 10:16am ...
There have been 70-odd pages in the BEV thread where you have repeatedly countered those who point out the public is being misled.
...

Do you have an example of anyone saying that if we all drive EVs, we can carry on in our present transport habits with all of the current benefits and none of the problems?

Or any evidence that anyone believes it to be true?

Thanks

Jonathan

I don't think there's a single definite example of the above two statements. What we do have, however is a complete lack of statements by either the Prime Minister, the Department of Transport, or other Government departments or through Government policy advising the public that electric cars will not solve many of the problems being faced or in support of alternative measures of transport. And when I say Government, I'm including all parties, including the Greens. Not one party has stood up on national television and said to the public, yes we are moving to electric vehicles, but they won't be the complete solution... not one person, in the mean time it appears that budgets to fund alternative cycling and walking routes are being squeezed again.

Electric vehicles won't solve the parking issues which are now common in many poorly planned residential areas, they certainly won't solve the issues of congestion, nor will they solve the potential energy crisis, or the reliance on electricity from our European counterparts. Nor will electric cars solve our growing obesity issues or our growing mental health problems, and they won't make the population any fitter than they are already..

Further to this there will still be the sense of isolation for those who either can not drive or can not afford to drive.

..then there's a question mark of the amount of lithium which existing and proposed mines can supply, there's question marks over how lithium batteries can be recycled.
Even if electric cars were to work, all the world will have managed to do is stave of the end of personal powered transport for another 60 or 70* years, after which the lithium mines are exhausted and the lithium above ground can no longer be recycled (simply because its been recycled too many times before')...
(* if that..)

Humanity may have to face the truth, that the idea or dream of powered, personal transportation (the private car) is now at its end... the only sensible and sane transport system will be mixed mode, and if we can face that in the here and now, we have a better change of redesigning society around mixed modes in the way that it will work better for everyone.

Yesterday in Somerset following an accident on the M5 near J23 (where the giga factory is going to be built) the motorway was closed and traffic going N was diverted off at J 25 and sent up the A38. This became so congested that stationary traffic built up to the outskirts of Exeter on the M5 some 30 miles south. Drivers then diverted onto the A361 across the Somerset levels trying to find another way back to rejoin the motorway. Eventually the A361 also became a car park resulting in traffic then taking to country lanes to make progress. Most of these lanes are single track with passing places. Result was total gridlock. Buses were cancelled, our village community cafe was full of tired motorists looking for refreshments. One driver going to Oxford was hopelessly lost having spent 3 hours driving 30 miles and wasn't going anywhere. I've never known congestion like this and it didn't clear until several hours after the motorway had reopened. There are just too many vehicles on the roads and everyone buries there heads thinking it's not their problem but everyone else's. I don't know the answer. Taxing drivers off the road would be a death sentence for whichever political party implemented it.
EV's won't solve this problem. We just need a cull of the population to reduce numbers to save resources before we go down the Soylent Green route.

It's not just too many vehicles it's too many people.

I'm 80 in a couple of months so I'm part of the problem. When I was born, 1943, the world population was around 2.5 billion. Today it is over 8 billion. That's a huge increase.
The 'experts' have said the Earth is able to sustain many more billions if we change our ways but I wonder what the quality of life would become.

Medicine, food production and science has enabled us to populate the earth in a way that has caused climate change.

In my childhood most people burnt coal for heating but few had cars. Air pollution was severe but we still had seasons with very cold winters.
If today we had a population of the 40/50's then most of our climate problems would not have occurred.
There's no going back so changes have to be made and personal transport, apart from bikes, may have to go and will be hugely unpopular.

Medicine, food production and science has enabled us to populate the earth in a way that has caused climate change.

Quite. One might argue too that it’s not the changes in the UK that have had the impact but the changes in the developing world - which only happened because we gave then the means to do so.

Global population growth is the bigger issue; however the UK population has certainly grown and our political leaders have no interest in addressing the ‘causes of that. There’s certainly no really long term planning and only an appetite for business as usual, electric cars being a prime example of that ‘sticking plaster’ philosophy. Then we have the ‘just stop’ merchants, well polarised change is just as daft and socially destructive.

Are all new ICE engines banned from sale from 2030? I'm thinking bigger vans, trucks and HGVs. Have they solved the weight to payload problem.

I drive an old VW campervan, less than 2,000 mils a year, almost all for camping trips. The value of my van is in the interior. Scrapping it seems counter productive due to the cost/carbon of replacing interior
Converting it to electric is incredibly expensive £30,000 ish). Looks like I'll be carrying on with it as a diesel till it's demise.

I wonder how practical BEVs will be as campervans and motorhomes.

Apparently, VW s attempt to make the new id buzz van itto a proper camper have a vehicle that's too heavy to drive on a normal licence. Their current plan is the Type 6 van with hybrid power unit.

simonhill wrote: ↑14 Aug 2023, 8:37am Are all new ICE engines banned from sale from 2030? I'm thinking bigger vans, trucks and HGVs.
...

The EU Fit for 55 applies to "new passenger cars and new light commercial vehicles":
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/do ... NIT/en/pdf
(that's the original version of the proposal).

Jonathan

Not to mention all the non-vehicular uses of ICEs: generators, power tools, industrial and agricultural machinery, marine uses...